Dejpu'bogh Hov rur qablli!*

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Dejpu'bogh Hov rur qablli!*

Whether Klingon or Esperanto or C, articial languages exert a powerful hold over the human imagination.

Some revolutions are easier to recruit soldiers for than others. For more than a hundred years, the Esperanto movement has been trying to attract disciples with a vision of a world unencumbered by language barriers - a happier, more peaceful world. Esperanto is in fact the world's leading artificial language, thanks to its simplicity: only 16 rules of grammar, no irregular verbs, every word spelled as it's pronounced. The vocabulary is easy to pick up, especially if you speak one of the European languages from which it's drawn.

In a lemon-yellow public school classroom on New York's Lower East Side, Thomas Eccardt erases the math problems on the board, nervously shuffies some papers, and surveys his class: four students, three of them over 50 years old. Eccardt feels the need to give them a sense of where Esperanto stands in America today: "It's not a tremendously big language. You probably don't know any Esperantists. So because it's small, it's sort of like a group of friends." Estimates of the number of Esperanto speakers worldwide range wildly, from 50,000 to 10 million, but 1 million seems like a reasonable guess - about as many as speak Estonian. Eccardt hands out photocopied lesson plans, but before the class can study sample sentences like "Esperanto estas internacia lingvo," he gives them a bit of history.

Esperanto was first proposed in 1887, by a Polish ophthalmologist, L. L. Zamenhof. Growing up in polyglot Warsaw in Russian Poland, he saw the need for a worldwide common tongue. As a young man, he published his language under the pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto," a word meaning "one who hopes" in his new invention. The language grew quickly; when Leo Tolstoy praised it, however, the czar suspected it was actually a seditionist plot. This accusation would eventually have to be fought off in many countries: Hitler despised Esperanto - not least because Zamenhof was Jewish - and made special efforts to quash it. The language has always had more appeal in Europe, where dozens of dialects live in close quarters. In America, its most widespread application has been in wargames; when rehearsing European battles, the US Army used to designate Esperanto as the official language of the Aggressor Force.

Around the world, there are roughly 5,000 different human languages spoken today. For some people, that's not enough: they keep inventing more. These linguistically inclined inventors belong to a grand tradition. Beginning with Lingua Ignota, concocted by the abbess Hildegard in the 12th century, people have created more than 700 artificial, or planned, languages. A traditional goal for such a project is to counteract the eternal excess of languages through creation of a modern lingua franca, as Latin was through medieval times, as French once was in diplomatic circles, and as Esperanto aspires to be. In the 19th century, the desire for an international tongue was so strong that hundreds of thousands learned Volapük, which was essentially a mishmash of German. Then, when Esperanto was introduced in 1887, almost all of the Volapükists switched over.

One of the earliest motivations for creating a language, however, was a quixotic one: to re-create humanity's ur-speech, the language used before an angry God destroyed the Tower of Babel, saying, "Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." Ramón Llull (1232-1316) strove for such a perfect language, convinced that it would be the perfect tool for Christian missionaries. Consisting of four figures and nine letters (b through k, excepting j), his Ars magna proved to be more of a device for generating theological statements than a spoken dialect. ("bk," for example, means "goodness is glorious.") Llull reportedly died while vainly trying to convert Saracen infidels with his new invention.

Since then, some have proposed returning to Latin, perhaps in a streamlined version: Latino sine Flexione, later known as Interlingua, eliminates all of the endings from conjugations and declensions. The Vatican, in fact, keeps working hard to come up with Latin terms for modern objects. A recent encyclical declared a videocassette to be "sonorarum visualiumque taeniarum cistellulae."

In the process of all this communication creation, it's becoming more evident than ever that languages are not just mutually agreed upon rituals of vocalization. Almost without exception, they become emblems of ethnic or national identity, of personal identity, of technological prowess. And more than mere pride can be at stake: the Japanese have good reason to be concerned that English has become the de facto standard of the Internet. Language can be a symbol of profits, and of power - after all, English became a major language in India not because the Sikhs wanted to read Wordsworth's poetry, but through the military muscle of the British Empire. And those larger linguistic struggles are fought on a smaller scale every day, sometimes over stakes no larger than an unfettered joy in creating new words or in establishing a community whose language can't be understood by others. (When a skateboarder refers to a "Stalefish McTwist over the Canyon," she knows that her parents will have no idea what she means.)

Artificial languages actually exaggerate the battles over what words mean and why; because their sounds have in an overt way been chosen, the whole concept of phonemes having assigned meanings gets thrown up in the air. These languages are also often roiled by civil wars that go far beyond the debates possible with a "living" language. Esperanto was plagued for decades by apostates touting a modified version of the language called Ido. C seems to have more fiavors than Baskin-Robbins. Because there's no entrenched culture for most artificial languages, everyone has an idea of how to improve them (and a better chance than, say, the World English crowd, who would spell conceived as "konseevd").

Authors, of course, have occasionally invented their own artificial languages to round out a fictional world. Anthony Burgess cooked up Nadsat, the language of the yobbos in A Clockwork Orange, by crossing English and Russian with bits of Malay, Dutch, Gypsy, French, and Cockney; Burgess also formulated the vocabulary of grunts for the movie Quest for Fire. For her Native Tongue trilogy, sci-fi author and linguistics professor Suzette Haden Elgin created a woman's language, Láadan, that reversed the gender biases of English. For The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien employed half a dozen major languages of his own invention: the tongues of the Dwarves and the Ents appear only in small snatches, but the philology of the Elves is sufficiently highly developed for Tolkien to have written epic poems and songs in Elvish: "A Elbereth Gilthoniel/ silivren penna míriel/ o menel aglar elenath!" Tolkien even went to the trouble of inventing an old language, Westron, and then hypothesizing how it would have evolved in parallel to the English language.

Sometimes it seems people have come up with artificial languages just to entertain themselves. In Uni, all the singular nouns have exactly three letters. Monling uses one-syllable words exclusively (rendering "the language easiest to learn and use is obviously the best" as "ling 't top pai ken ad ploi, il klar top bon"). Gibson Code employs numbers rather than letters: nouns begin with 1, 2, or 3; even numbers are plural, odd singular.

One of the oddest artificial languages ever was Solrésol, invented by François Soudre in 1827. The Frenchman reasoned that since music was the universal language, the seven notes of the musical scale were the perfect building blocks for an international vocabulary. Single notes were reserved for simple words (do for "no," re for "and"), double notes for pronouns, triple notes for everyday words (do-re-la for "year"), and longer combinations for more uncommon terms. In addition, opposites were expressed whenever possible by reversing the order of the notes: do-mi-sol for "God" means that "Satan" must be sol-mi-do. Soudre tinkered with the language for 45 years, but was never able to overcome the fundamental fiaw: people would rather speak a conversation than whistle it.

Long before that, in the 17th century, the quest for a perfect language had taken on a scientific fiavor: amateur linguists were looking for the ideal medium to bring the march of progress to the common man and impose order on the unruly European languages. Francis Bacon suggested that ideas could be classified with an alphabet that represented fundamental notions. In 1629, Descartes proposed a similar scheme, based on a numerical index. Soon, classificational languages were springing up like erudite crabgrass. (They're also called a priori philosophical languages: a priori meaning that they have no borrowed vocabulary, philosophical meaning that each letter helps determine the denotation of the word.) Dozens were invented over the next two centuries; Sotos Ochado proposed a fairly typical one in 1855. In his scheme, words beginning with a refer to inorganic objects, b the liberal arts, c mechanical sciences, d politics, and so on. Pity the high school chemistry class where hydrogen is ababe, oxygen is ababa, and nitrogen is ababi.In 1960, Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal took matters a step further. He designed Lincos, a language with a very specific application: communicating with aliens in other galaxies. The same year, James Cooke Brown proposed a more earthbound project in Scientific American - Loglan, short for logical language. Loglan was designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language infiuences the thoughts of the speaker, rather than being an empty vessel for expression. With a grammatical structure based on the rules of predicate logic, Loglan would presumably train a speaker to think more clearly.

Artificial languages are more than codes. Although the distinction can be blurry, a code typically is an attempt to disguise another language: pig Latin and Morse code rely on a knowledge of English for a message to be understood. Computer programs are referred to as "code" with good reason, but in some ways, computer languages fulfill one of the oldest goals of language designers: a universal tongue whose perfection recalls the days before Babel. Fortran and Pascal have massively stunted vocabularies, but their grammar brooks no ambiguity. They aim not just to be comprehensible to programmers of many countries, but to find an even deeper connection. The languages presume that their grammar refiects both the way human beings think and the way machines think.

Moreover, like some other artificial languages, computer languages assume that no matter what your native tongue, a deeper pattern of thought lies in your linguistic pathways. When we program computers, we may be teaching the hardware to obey our commands - but as anyone who has ever debugged code for days at a time can tell you, the computer also teaches us to think like a machine.

The regularity and simplicity of many artificial languages make them ideal for artificial intelligence research. One language often put forward for this purpose is Lojban, an offshoot of Loglan. Lojban uses the same grammar as Loglan but a completely separate vocabulary; the schism came in 1986 when James Cooke Brown, the creator of Loglan, tried to assert his copyright. Nobody's entirely sure whether a language is in fact copyrightable, but artificial language enthusiasts tend not to have lots of cash to press the issue in court.

Loglan has had long periods of inactivity and has been crimped by its designer's tendency toward constant revision and improvement. So, explains Bob LeChevalier, president of the Logical Language Group, when the group released a guide to Lojban grammar this year, they promised not to fiddle with it for five years. They didn't want people to be chary of learning a language that might be obsolete by the time they were done.

LeChevalier is mostly concerned with getting enough people speaking the language that they can teach others and promulgate it - then, he hopes, serious scientific research will follow. He doesn't even want to speculate on what form a test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might take, because it's still decades away.

Most Lojbanists are scientifically minded, as some initiates find when they try to translate song lyrics. "Lojban can handle metaphor, "LeChevalier says, "but there's kind of a mind-set in the community that doesn't like figurativeness."

A Lojban handbook warns: "Lojban has none of the standard parts of speech. Lojban's 'predicate words' can serve as the equivalent of a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. Lojban also supports a 'tense' logic that allows extreme specificity of time and space and relationships, even those implied by time travel." Unsurprisingly, speakers have not fiocked to this language; right now, there are only about 250, of whom 10 or so are fiuent. LeChevalier wistfully recalls an epic Lojban conversation that took place last year: it lasted two hours.

The fastest-growing artificial language today doesn't even attempt to take on the whole of human experience; in fact, its vocabulary has a decided bent toward painsticks and blood pies. The Klingons, Star Trek's interstellar samurai, have a guttural language of their very own, and while it's best suited for barking phrases like "Your face looks like a collapsed star!" (Dejpu'bogh Hov rur qablIj!), devotees have found it adaptable enough to translate songs from Fiddler on the Roof. Due to the magic of the Universal Translator, the original Trek series provided no clues as to what the Klingon language might sound like, beyond the characters' names (Kang, Koloth, Kor). So when a few lines of Klingon dialog were needed for the first Star Trek movie, in 1979, James Doohan (who plays engineer Scott) leapt at the chance. He spat a few lines of aggressive nonsense into a tape recorder and told an actor playing a Klingon to go memorize it. Five years later, on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the producers wanted to be able to have large chunks of Klingon dialog. So they recruited Marc Okrand, a linguist working at the National Captioning Institute, who had come up with a few lines of Vulcan as a favor to friends working on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He remembers of that experience, "I drove away from the studio thinking, 'My God, I just taught Mr. Spock how to speak Vulcan.'"

Extrapolating from Doohan's sounds, Okrand invented a vocabulary and grammar and translated every line of dialog spoken by a Klingon in Star Trek III. He then stayed on the set to correct mistakes - and to incorporate new coinages. Okrand reasoned that since the Klingons were warriors rather than philosophers, their language would emphasize action, and therefore verbs. Klingon has three official parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and everything else. Adjectives don't exist per se: there is no word meaning simply "greedy," although there is a verb "to be greedy" (qur). And most adverbs are agglutinative; that is, limitless strings of suffixes can be attached to a verb to modify its meaning. Some of the suffixes are familiar, such as the ones that can be translated as "perfectly" or "seemingly." Some are not, such as the suffix that indicates the sentence's subject is changing something in the world, or the suffix that lets you know the sentence is a question answerable with "yes" or "no."

Okrand made the language as alien as possible. Sentence structure is object-verb-subject, a virtually nonexistent combination in human linguistics. It can be found in about six out of the tens of thousands of languages that humankind has spoken through the ages. The word order for "Lieutenant Worf killed the Romulan with his phaser" in Klingon is "phaser his using while Romulan kill Worf Lieutenant."

Having devised a language that resembles a Rube Goldberg invention, Okrand convinced Pocket Books to publish The Klingon Dictionary in 1985. Although he had gone to the trouble of constructing a complete syntax, Okrand expected the book to sell only as a novelty item: people would buy a copy for their coffee tables, teach themselves how to shout "Surrender or die!" at other cars on the freeway, and then forget about it. Eleven years later, The Klingon Dictionary has sold more than 250,000 copies. For the vast majority of Trekkers who have bought it, the book remains the joke that Okrand anticipated. But a small coterie of Klingonites have tackled the baroque syntactic structure and learned to pronounce sounds like "ng" at the beginning of a word. While these kamikaze linguists tend to be Trek fans, they overlap only minimally with the crowd who put on costumes and fake foreheads for sci-fi conventions. The Klingon Language Institute, a scholarly organization in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, that publishes the journal HolQeD and the fiction and poetry magazine jatmey, has roughly 1,000 members.

"All the fiuent Klingon speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together," Lawrence Schoen, director of the Klingon Language Institute, cheerfully admits. There are about a dozen of them; one is d'Armond Speers, a linguistics PhD candidate at Georgetown University and the father of a 2-year-old son he's bringing up to be bilingual in English and Klingon. Speers' wife speaks only English, while Speers speaks only Klingon - except when he's reading favorite bedtime stories. Dr. Seuss is not yet available in a Klingon translation. The young boy isn't speaking either language yet.

The few people who can jabber in Klingon effortlessly have all surpassed Marc Okrand, who isn't fiuent in his own invention. And they're light-years beyond the actors and scriptwriters faking their way through the various Star Trek TV series. The Klingon on Deep Space Nine is usually baby talk. "Sometimes they get it right," says Okrand diplomatically.

Robert O'Reilly, who plays the Klingon leader Gowron in a recurring role, says that the tyro Klingon actors sometimes ask him for pronunciation advice just before the cameras start rolling. "I say, 'Just do it with belief. Go all the way!'" In Klingon, "belief" often translates as saliva: when Gowron and Michael Dorn's Worf have a confrontation, makeup artists have to wipe the spittle off them between takes. One guide for speakers of Klingon advises them to begin by purchasing a large supply of napkins.

Klingon is all the more satisfying for its visceral passion. Memorizing tables of prenomial prefixes is less dry when the result is command of a bloody vocabulary. What could be more fun than translating the Sesame Street theme song into Klingon and discovering that "Sunny day, chasing the clouds away" comes back as "Day of the daytime star, the clouds are filled with dread and forced to fiee"?

Paramount once served the Klingon Language Institute with a cease-and desist letter demanding that they stop using the word Klingon in their literature, before relenting and granting KLI a license to use the copyrighted language. This year, KLI published a Klingon translation of Hamlet, following the lead of a throwaway line in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, "You cannot appreciate Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon." KLI's Bible Translation Project is also in full swing - using only translators who can read the original Hebrew and Greek. Paramount is also seeking to profit from the language's growing popularity. In addition to the instructional tapes Conversational Klingon and Power Klingon, last spring saw the publication of Okrand's book of proverbs The Klingon Way: A Warrior's Guide and the three-volume CD-ROM, Star Trek Klingon: The Ultimate Interactive Adventure, featuring both a language lab for drilling vocabulary and an interactive adventure that requires some fiuency in Klingon to successfully navigate.

While Speers has been told more than once that he's going to permanently screw up his child, he's studied enough developmental linguistics to believe that bilingual children learn to use each language in the appropriate situation and have greater academic success later in life. What he doesn't know is whether Klingon will prove sufficiently expressive for his son's needs as he grows older. While 10,000 words are typically needed for an adult vocabulary in any language, Klingon has only 2,000: some identify less-useful terms like "Tribbles," and one word serves for the colors green, blue, and yellow.

Americans often mock the very idea of designing a global language - it reeks of the antiquated idealism of the League of Nations. Why waste time learning a synthetic vocabulary if English is a de facto standard around the world? But although English is spoken by 10 percent of the world's population, global saturation is probably not in the cards - too many countries are on guard against English and what it represents. Every national tongue, if proposed as a lingua franca, has the faint stench of imperialism. The European Union has sidestepped this question by letting every member country designate its native tongue as another official language of Europe, which only emphasizes the need for a neutral solution. If there is ever to be a true international vernacular, it will probably have to be an artificial language. And though Esperanto seems to be on the wane, it still stands as the embodiment of that possibility.

If Esperanto is nothing else, it is widespread: speakers live in more than a hundred nations. It tends to be more popular in countries where the native tongue isn't an international standard: Brazil, Hungary, Bulgaria. (In Eastern Europe, there's even a slew of Esperanto rock bands.) It's also widespread among members of the Baha'i faith; the prophet Baha'u'llah foretold that the world would be united by one language. And oddly enough, Esperanto has a following in China. In 1991, Chinese state television ran a 40-part series on Esperanto; the idea seems to have been that it would not automatically lead to bourgeois decadence the way that learning English would.

Esperanto proponents still tend to speak (and write) about the language in terms that suggest its worldwide triumph is just around the corner, if only people would take the time to investigate. "Esperanto sounds great!" bubbles one pamphlet. "It has a melodious, euphonious sound that is pleasant to speak and hear." Not everyone shares such enthusiasm for the language. The Interlingua Institute has gone so far as to issue screeds attacking Esperanto and detailing its fiaws: its insistence on ending nouns with o mutilates place names, with USA becoming "Usono"; the rule that all adjectives end in a has annoying exceptions like "iu" (some) and "tiu" (this); the inclusion of six new letters (–c, –g, –h, –j, –s, û) means that many printing presses and computers can't handle Esperanto text. "It is pathetic to see people wasting their time and their lives on such dreck," concludes essayist Frank Esterhill.

Of course, the wagon that Esterhill's hitched his horse to is Interlingua, which optimistically might have 100 speakers, and is most practical for describing plant diseases. Who's wasting time is open for debate. But any artificial language will always be beset by spitballs and suggested modifications: the planet Earth is too big to establish voluntary standards with any ease. For Esperanto, or Interlingua, or even Elvish, to become internationally accepted, somebody would have to blanket the hemispheres with it. The United Nations doesn't have enough muscle for the job, but Nike and Coca-Cola might.

Even if an artificial language somehow became the global standard, it would have the problem of any living language: its speakers would play with it and invent new terms. Soon enough, there would be local jargon, and then dialects; eventually, it would splinter into variants as different as Oxford English and Jamaican patois, leading once again to communication breakdown. Any language is like a melting ice cube: dictionaries and grammar mavens may try to keep it frozen, but if it gets used, it will keep changing and liquefying. So far, only computer languages remain impervious to slang. Their evolutions and revisions are neatly numbered and documented in manuals.

As any software developer knows, however, the best-conceived, most elegant platform doesn't always survive. The Klingon language, for all its tongue-twisting pronunciations, will probably thrive as long as the Star Trek series stay in reruns, outliving any number of more easily digested artificial dialects. True believers looking to bolster their faith in the prospects for a world language might look to the unlikely source of Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1876, he predicted that there would one day be an international language, "as certainly as there will someday be travel by air."